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Arizona Bugatti Veyron video leaves police fuming

A video shot in Arizona featuring a Bugatti Veyron has police in that state irked. Photo Credit: J.Smith831/Wikimedia Commons/CC-BY-SA

A video was recently posted to YouTube showing a Bugatti Veyron hitting 225 miles per hour on public roads in Arizona. Police in the state are fuming, as the driver in the viral video has thumbed his nose at the law in $1.7 million supercar.

Seven speeds

A recently posted video which has since gone viral shows the brutal pace possible the Bugatti Veyron, according to the Daily Mail. The video was allegedly shot using public roads in the state of Arizona in the year 2009. The car went on seven high-speed runs, hitting 225 miles per hour.

Granted, the car was only in “handling mode,” the setting used for normal driving. To hit the car’s 253 mile per hour limit in the standard Veyron one has to select “Top Speed” mode, which would likely result in a fatal accident on standard public roads due to the uneven surfaces. According to Reuters, Arizona police are furious.

Officers couldn’t catch up if they wanted to

If a Veyron owner decided to gun it, police couldn’t catch up if they tried. The car, according to AutoGuide, is powered by a quad-turbocharged 16-cylinder eight-liter engine, producing about 1,000 horsepower. Getting from 0 to 60 miles per hour takes 2.6 seconds. The standard Veyron costs about $1.7 million, or enough to buy 100 Toyota Camrys.

Arizona authorities are excoriating the driver for the stunt. A spokesman for the Arizona Department of Public Safety, Bart Graves, was quoted as saying “If he’s rich enough to own a car like this, he’s rich enough to rent a racetrack in Tuscon or Phoenix” and that “this is a criminal act.” If charges are brought, the driver could lose his license and face prison time for reckless driving. Given that he was pulled over during a portion of the video, not during a high speed run, the police know who he is.

The video, which is titled “Bugatti Veyron High Speed Runs x7,” asserts that the high-speed portion of the video was shot in Mexico, not Arizona. However, it’s impossible to tell from the video what country it is filmed in.

Speed does kill

According to a report from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, 32 percent of fatal crashes were due to speeding in 2002, representing about 13,713 fatalities. In 2004, it was 30 percent of fatal crashes, or 13,192 deaths. The economic cost of speeding-related crashes was about $40.4 billion that year.